Subjects
In order to plan a suitable set of textbooks we need to discuss every subject in the K-12 curriculum. Please add subjects, links to Free textbooks, and relevant Free Software. As this discussion grows, we will need to separate out many of these subjects into separate pages.
We should create a Creative-Commons style license permitting translation and electronic publishing in languages of developing countries for literature, textbooks, and software. We would like to see completely Free licensing of educational materials, but it will be helpful in dealing with commercial publishers to have an intermediate license that expands their future market at essentially no cost to them, without cutting into current markets.
Contents
Music
Every schoolchild in The Netherlands learns to play recorder and read music. Plastic recorders cost about $5 each. The program could be adapted to handmade local instruments, including flutes or drums of various kinds.
There is a wide variety of MIDI editors and players, and many media players. Lilypond is a notation program that produces scores for printing as PDFs or in other formats.
Ear training software
Many cultures will want to preserve their traditional music. We will have to create a program for helping them preserve their intellectual property rights in this material.
Arts and Crafts
Children in many countries are gainfully employed making rugs and other items for international sale. Organizations like eBay, Overstock.com, and Novica/National Geographic can help them sell while staying in school, in stark contrast to traditional child labor. These e-commerce sites are active in dozens of countries, and are eager to expand to more. The creators receive something like 65% of the final selling price, as opposed to the pennies/hour that rug factories in Pakistan pay to their workers. The only conditions are (for Novica) that the goods can be delivered to their distribution centers in Africa and Asia, and (for all) that there be a reasonable way to communicate with the sellers (locally rentable mobile phone, knowing somebody who knows somebody who has a computer and Internet).
It seems likely that OLPC could become completely self-funding by organizing local businesses to assist sellers.
Free Software for graphics: The GIMP and many others
Reading and Writing
English is a particularly difficult language to [learn to read and write. Raymond Kurzweil researched the problem for the Reading Machine that he invented at MIT and made into his first product. His text-to-speech engine had more than 2,000 spelling rules programmed in, and in addition more than 2,000 exceptions (words like "once", and all the words ending in "ough").
See 40329/002744.html OUGH by Charles Battell Loomis
"He wound the bandage around the wound." etc.
However, few of the target local languages for OLPC are anything like that difficult to read and write, in large part because many of them have no historical spelling baggage to overcome.
In the 1960s, Omar Khayyam Moore programmed an IBM 360 with a Selectric printing terminal to teach children to read at age 2.
Literature
We must assist in the creation of online repositories of out-of-copyright and Creative-Commons licensed literature in all languages.
Arithmetic and Mathematics
Montessori materials
Free Software: Spreadsheets, calculators, symbolic math, mathematical programming languages from FORTRAN to APL, libraries.
Arithmetic of various kinds of numbers, from natural numbers to the complex field and Conway numbers
Notations: decimal and other bases, fractions, decimals
Analytic geometry
Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry
Number theory (essential for cryptography)
Trigonometry
Probability and statistics
calculus
logic
Set theory
Algebraic structures and categories
Free textbooks
Mathematical journals
Sciences
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Periodic table software
sky map software
Data acquisition and analysis software
Scientific visualization software
Scientific journals
Ecology
Sustainable development
Languages
The Internet provides unequalled resources for the language learner: literature, dictionaries, grammars, translation aids, e-mail, chat, radio downloads and streams...
Yiddish Shraybmashinke
Japanese annotation of any page]
Cangjie Chinese typing tutorial pages
Kiten, Edict, Kdict, KVocTrain, KWordQuiz
History
Religious
Cultural
Political
Science and technology
Ideas
Human Rights
Anthropology and Sociology
Geography
Google Earth! There is a Linux client from Google, and a project to produce a Free client.
Civics
Human rights
Constitutions
Treatises of government
Election observers
Economics
Free markets and human rights
Unions and labor law
Cooperatives
Theory of the Firm
Programming
Dozens of programming languages
Integrated development environments (IDEs)
Free Software code repositories, such as SourceForge
Localization HOWTO
GNU
Agile development
Computer Science
Database
Algorithms and data structures
Language recognizers
Turing machines and equivalent computing systems
Computable functions
Church's Thesis
Knuth's MIX computer emulation
Complexity of algorithms: P and NP
